DeepSeek Plans to Purchase 160,000 Huawei Ascend 950DT Chips to Build Inner Mongolia Data Center
nashnova research
DeepSeek plans to deploy at least 160,000 Huawei Ascend 950DT chips in Inner Mongolia, building one of China's largest known Huawei AI chip clusters — but Huawei's constrained output means delivery could take over a year.
What are 160,000 chips for?
DeepSeek plans to use the 950DT for inference — running trained AI models to answer queries and generate content — not for training.
This means → DeepSeek still relies on Nvidia chips for the most compute-heavy training step; Huawei hardware handles only the second half of the pipeline.
The 950DT is an upgrade of Huawei's 910C, widely seen as comparable to Nvidia's previous-generation Hopper architecture.
Can Huawei deliver?
Shortages in high-end memory and other key components cap 950DT output this year at the low hundreds of thousands.
Huawei must also balance other customers and a small export push, so filling DeepSeek's order could take over a year.
In plain terms = DeepSeek wants to buy more; Huawei can't build fast enough — production capacity is the deal's biggest bottleneck.
How does this stack up globally?
Six months ago, China's first Huawei Ascend 10,000-card compute cluster had just come online; Elon Musk's xAI already ran a cluster ten times that size.
If the Inner Mongolia project lands on schedule, it would sharply narrow the US–China gap in AI compute cluster scale.
Under Huawei's production roadmap, China could have several clusters of comparable size running simultaneously — this signals a shift from one-off breakthroughs to broad domestic buildout.
Where is the money coming from — and why go domestic?
DeepSeek is in talks to raise several billion dollars for infrastructure buildout.
Chinese private AI firms still prefer Nvidia, but US export controls have largely blocked Nvidia from selling high-end chips to China.
This means → DeepSeek isn't choosing Huawei by preference — export restrictions have narrowed the options, and policy pressure is accelerating domestic substitution.
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